Viggo Mortensen among the Nazis.
Possibly the most hootable scene in a mainstream movie this year occurs in "
Good
," when
Viggo Mortensen
looks in a mirror and discovers that — hey! — he's become a Nazi. The time is 1937; the place, Berlin; and for the previous hour or so, we've watched Mortensen's character, a mild-mannered German academic named John Halder, being effortlessly led over to the dark side by SS political recruiters. Since he's been hobnobbing with people named Goebbels and Eichmann, we are in no doubt about what he's become, and his shock seems preposterous.
Seventy years after the fact, we know better, of course. But at the time, so did the many people of various ethnic and political tints who fled Germany and the soon-to-fall Austria before the Nazi clampdown made escape exceedingly difficult. The movie wants to point out, correctly, that it wasn't only knuckle-draggers who elected to stay; and if Halder were actually smart, instead of just extensively credentialed, the picture might offer something to think about. (Joseph Goebbels, the Nazis' odious propaganda minister, was a literary scholar with a legitimate PhD — what was
his
story?) But Halder is a nitwit, a pre-moral being — he could be seduced into anything. Mortensen, having no alternative, plays him as the overeducated lunk he is (it's an unusually dull performance by such a fine actor). Strong and Isaacs bring an enlivening tang to their characters, but the movie is becalmed in the tasteful glow provided by prestige-project cinematographer Andrew Dunn. And the way Brazilian director Vicente Amorim connects the familiar plot dots, the picture becomes essentially a roadmap to historical terrain we already know all too well.
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"I never thought it would come to this," Halder says at one ridiculous point. But since serious thought of any sort was never a part of his personal syllabus, why should we be surprised? He's a man with no tragic dimension. The banality of evil is a rich subject; the cluelessness of same, not so much.
Check out Kurt Loder's review of "
Defiance
," also new in theaters this week.
Viggo Mortensen and Jodie Whittaker in "Good"
Photo: THINKFilm